Found via the Internet Movie Database, The Art of the Title is just what it says, a compendium of great opening title sequences from the history of the movies. They’re not necessarily the titles I’d pick — Saul Bass seems to be pretty woefully underrepresented in the clips available at the site, but still, there’s loads of great stuff there. A revelation was the opening title sequence for Steve McQueen’s Bullitt, produced by Pablo Ferro, who also produced the titles for Dr. Strangelove, McQueen’s Thomas Crown Affair, Men in Black, and a host of other films:
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It’s worth it to watch the above clip in the big crystal clear high-res transfer at The Art of the Title. A lot of work went into this sequence, shooting the actors on the film’s sets, creating both color and black and white elements, storyboarding the whole thing, animating on and off screen the text, cutting in the dissolves where the text reveals a new film layer, etc. And this was 30 years or so before Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, and other computer software allowed for graphic sequences to be produced on a computer; these are all film elements layered by hand on an optical printer. (Which helps to explain why expensive title sequences such as the above were in short supply after the lights went out on Big Hollywood in the late 1960s, and before George Lucas jump-started the epic with Star Wars.
One man who was keeping the tradition of Saul Bass and other great title designers from the 1950s and ’60s alive during those lean years was Maurice Binder. Ultra Swank links to a nifty two-part video tribute (narrated by Patrick Macnee), to Binder who created all those wonderful James Bond titles where silhouetted Bond girls twirl in slow-motion across the barrel of Sean Connery and Roger Moore’s err, Luger — to create symbolism that would have made Freud blush. But then, sometimes a silhouetted Bond girl twirling atop a giant firearm is merely a silhouetted Bond girl twirling atop a giant firearm:
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I owned a company which did this art form for a living, all during the early advent of digital and CGI. It’s really a fun field, but fairly obscure. If done well it looks like it just happened, but I assure you it’s crazy how involved I sometimes is…
“it sometimes is”. Sorry — posting on an iPod.
It was James Bond Walther PP.
Bob,
I think the barrel in the videos is far too long to be a Walther PPK.
(Paging Dr. Freud…Paging Dr. Freud…
)
My father worked as a typesetter in LA during the 50s and 60s. Most of his work was advertising typography but one of his clients was Saul Bass. My dad always said the toughest one was the North By Northwest sequence.